Travel Schedule Woes

 

Roland and I are planners. We plan our travels years in advance, so when something falls through, it leaves us scrambling for alternatives. This was a particular problem during COVID, when we had to reschedule trips to South Africa and to Australia/New Zealand, but we got through the travel withdrawal somehow without losing the addiction. Then in 2022 we had to postpone the Ireland half of a trip to Iceland and Ireland after Roland tested positive for COVID. We made that up with a trip to Ireland last year.

Now we have to change our plans again. Roland put a lot of time and effort into arranging a trip to Eastern Europe this summer. He found two tours from our preferred providers that we could take back-to-back, with a seven-hour train ride between the end of the first to the beginning of the second. One was a land tour of Croatia and Slovenia with EF Go Ahead Tours, and the other is a river cruise from Bucharest to Budapest on Viking, which is is the other leg of the first trip we took with Viking in 2015..

Then EF emailed to say that their tour was cancelled because not enough people had signed up. They offered some alternatives, but none of them worked with the Viking cruise, which we will take as scheduled. The three trips we have done with EF Go Ahead have all been good experiences, so although it didn’t work for this summer, we had no hesitation about booking with them again. Since we had already been talking about doing a land tour of Portugal, Spain, and Morocco, we used the credits from the cancelled tour to book that one for the end of next year.

When we find a provider we like, we stick with them. This summer will be our fifth cruise with Viking, and we are going to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand with them next year.

Now the question is: Where do we go after Spain?

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The photo at the head of this post shows the boat we were on during our first cruise with Viking in 2015. It was docked in Budapest at the time.